Through the Booking Glass

MUSINGS ON LITERATURE. 

I used to get my exercise running through the hallways of Hogwarts. I went to school through wardrobes and saw the world through a looking glass. I traveled through time in tree houses. I consumed words as fervently as I ate the food on the table. Emerald princesses, golden compasses, winged horses, dangerous rings. Fire-filled dragons, laboratory dinosaurs, blast-ended skrewts. These were just a few of my favorites things. In many ways, stories became more real to me than my reality.

Now, in my late-twenties and desperately searching for guidance on how to live the life of my dreams, I find myself falling back on fiction. My life is a mishmash of factors: educated as an anthropologist through graduate school, workforce trained in the medical field, inspired by art and music and words and travel and studies of human nature. I search for beauty and happiness and creative outlets as I attempt to link old experiences with new opportunities for a novel career—one that will fulfill me. But between paying rent, hoping for a good tax return, writing cover letters, eating my vegetables, and juggling errands all for the sake of adulting... there are many days in which I search for excuses to escape, where I hunt for hope and distractions between the pages of books. So for better or worse, this tendency to live in literature still defines me.

We all have that friend who reads like they breathe. Who devours each story as if they will never get the chance again. Who finishes the last page and feels a sense of loss, who has to take a moment to let go of the world into which they threw themselves. Who misses storybook friends they made that feel somehow more real than the ones who lived down the block. I’m that friend, at least in phases. Sometimes, I admit, even I will have months where I lack the inspiration to start a new book. Days where it is easier to fall into a Netflix binge rather than the first chapter. And then I will stumble past a bookstore while walking somewhere else, never expecting that through that door I will find Narnia instead of fur coats, and be sucked back in to the infinite worlds within. And each time I change a bit as a person.

Let me explain a bit further. Those of you who read frequently, fervently, passionately, will understand me completely as I say that a good book can change your life. Even a short story or a measly little blog post has the ability to take you by the heart and mind and change you. Perhaps it just improves your mood, maybe it makes you laugh, maybe it makes you cry, maybe it stops your tears, or maybe it completely changes your outlook on life and love and reality. Words can mold your sense of self and perceptions of the world in ways just as tangible as actions. They can be prescribed to cure heartache or fought for to preserve freedom. Many books serve to not only inspire and educate, but to twist understandings and exploit fears. They seduce (sometimes mind, sometimes body, sometimes both) and terrify. They highlight histories that we may rather wish to sweep away. They create new worlds that channel our own. They invert our understandings and develop new universes of comprehension.

To those who don’t read often, or find it boring, or can rarely find a book you like, maybe this sounds dramatic. Or perhaps enticing. Either way, I am a firm believer that in reading, as in so many other things, practice makes perfect. Learning to let literature soak into your being, to allow yourself to open your mind to the impossible, may take concentration and a concerted effort. But sometimes all it takes is one story to stir up a passion. It is a matter of opening your self up to the words and to the story. Too often in school we are made to read more pages than our brain can absorb, to critique every aspect of a book, to read for what’s “in between the lines” rather than to read the story itself and get to the “in between” organically. It removes some of the joy of the process. A story is more than just an assortment of essay topics couched in an introduction, a plot, and a conclusion; it instead is an outpouring of effort, emotion, and thoughts from the author. It is a new understanding, an experience as real as anything.

But I digress. It does not matter if you are in the first group of readers (the addicts) or the second (the unconvinced). My point is this: literature is shaped by the culture it emerges from, but culture can be shaped in vital ways by the literature we create. Our perceptions are changed and our worldviews informed by the books we read. Ever heard of a reference to Big Brother watching over you? Or indeed, just watched the reality show? 1984 is just one exceptional example of how our understanding of government, security, and privacy have become informed by a work of fiction. We are surrounded by imagined words and worlds and phrases that often have a very concrete impact on our lives.

So with these musings, I want to pay homage to the books that have changed my perceptions of reality, highlighted the obvious or not-so-obvious world around me, or simply made me happy. I will continue to report the world around me with literature as my lens as I tell my stories through the booking glass.